Lucrezia Borgia has a bad reputation, and that holds whether you’re talking about the historical figure or Donizetti’s 1833 opera. The woman herself is fascinating: was she really the perpetrator of as many murders as she gets the blame for? As for the opera, when it first reached Paris, Victor Hugo – on whose play it was based – got an injunction to stop it being performed, so perhaps even he realised that its plot was something to blush about. Dramatically, it’s a convoluted story of concealed identity ending in a mass poisoning but with all but one of the deaths offstage; in between, there’s an elaborately set-up execution that’s easily foiled when, Bond-villain-style, the instigator simply leaves the room.
Eloise Lally’s straightforward production doesn’t lift this quite enough, dark and atmospheric though it is in Adam Wiltshire’s sets, with their flaming torches and stained-glass windows. As a touring show it’s necessarily lean, but the lack of a chorus, and therefore of any real sense of public versus private, sometimes confuses things. The party in the final act seems to be taking place in a men’s steam room.
None of this is really the point of the opera, though; it’s written to be a display case for a stunning voice. Paula Sides, an ETO favourite, perhaps lacks the last bit of fierceness to pin you to your seat but her voice has plenty of edge nonetheless; she sings the role beautifully, wrapping her supple soprano round all of Donizetti’s roulades and leaps and almost making her character sympathetic. She’s supported by the period-instrument players of the Old Street Band, sounding characterful and transparent in the pit as conducted by Gerry Cornelius.
It’s not all Lucrezia’s show, though. There’s some stylish and honeyed singing from the tenor Thomas Elwin, who warms into the role of gormless Gennaro, Lucrezia’s unsuspecting long-lost son, and the mezzo Katie Coventry as Orsini makes a nice buddy pairing with him. Aidan Edwards makes you wish there was more music for Alfonso – Lucrezia’s fourth husband, as she pointedly likes to remind him. Don’t ask what happened to the other three.
English Touring Opera’s Lucrezia Borgia is on tour until 26 May
